January 17, 2018

Waiting for Dot Gov

Yes, it’s possible. It’s coming from a side angle though. Basically Congress is going to have to admit at some point that the credit card companies keep better track of individuals. And then the credit card companies will have to admit that the new crypto devs have a more secure way of keeping individuals in control of their own identity. And then somebody at Apple is going to make it easy to integrate anonymous identity with iCloud and ApplePay.

Basically, the interest around blockchain and cryptocurrency is going to drive the development of secure identity management and peer to peer payment tech.

If you look at something like Keybase you can get a feel for how a single ID can federate other well known IDs.

I forget the name of this other company, but they have the ability to take your one credit card and make it authorized for all your online purchases except you use a different ‘credit card number’ for each transaction. So your single, real credit card ID is never used online. It’s just used to authorize, from your desktop (or thumbprint as Apple has proven), an on-the-spot value card. This technology is similar to Amazon KMS and HashiCorp’s Vault. IE it’s already done and well understood.

This combination of technologies already exist. The question is basically who is going to mainstream it best. I bet Apple will. Now let’s say they do that next year or late this year. How many Congressmen do you have to buy in order for them to

Get it

Regulate it

Authorize it’s use for Government things.

Get bureaucrats across the US to understand it.

Yeah almost never. Which means somebody needs to hack the other two credit bureaus to prove what we already know. Current identification schemes that dominate US commerce are insecure and outdated. Then of course you’ll have to deal with millions of paranoids about the possibility of a National ID, seeing as it’s ‘racist’ to have people show a driver’s license when they vote.

Bottom line. Stop hoping for the masses. Do the math, figure it out, and do it with people who already get it now. And yes I did triple my money in Bitcoin (and in Amazon stock before that (and in Google before that (and in Netscape before that (and in Inktomi before that)))) and no I’m not hurt by the price collapse today.

On the other hand, there will be people who will slowly duplicate old tech with new tech, and maybe they’ll be able to sell this stuff. The old dis-spirited workers at the NSA and CIA are going to have to work somewhere.